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Sync and the Teleological Swimming Pool

* The following essay was recently featured on Episode 84 of Sync Book Press‘ Always Record. If interested, the audio version can be found here.

In 1945 the incomparable George Orwell composed an illuminating essay titled What is Science? At first glance the answer to this question seems obvious enough. Whether learned through explicit instruction or absorbed via cultural osmosis, most westernized people think of science as an enterprise carried out in labs by professional academics. However Orwell saw it differently and so should we. He defined science as “A method of thought which obtains verifiable results by reasoning logically from observed fact.” Only when curious amateurs and professionals alike pursue scientific truth in this way can meaningful answers concerning the origins of synchronicity (aka sync) be uncovered.

All too often however answers to questions concerning the mechanical underpinnings of synchronicity devolve into tired new age rhetoric and vague references to quantum physics. Certainly the mysterious nature of quantum mechanics is a good starting point for further inquiry, but the truth is quantum theory in its current form is truncated and provides no explainable mechanism for what we understand to be synchronistic interconnectedness. Experiments that brought our attention to the weird world of wave-particle duality, entanglement, and “spooky action at a distance” were never predicted by quantum theory, and continue to lack a coherent theoretical explanation. Despite many scientists’ use of lofty rhetoric when discussing their motivations, their blatant disinterest in addressing fundamental questions demonstrates that the establishment in general cares little about attaining a true understanding of reality. “Shut up and calculate” is their mantra, and the vacant pursuit of funding and technological progress is their endgame. Moving beyond or extending an incomplete theory is often the last thing on their minds. Therefore we have to take it upon ourselves to look past the Standard Model when confronting the enigmas of science.

However before we set out to pursue those deeper truths we must first ask what constitutes “observed fact”. If we don’t the danger exists of slipping into a delusional idea space and becoming hopelessly lost. Despite the noisy objections of most neo-Darwinian materialists, observation tells us we live in an ordered world pregnant with purpose and underwritten by cooperative interdependence. For example the rapidly advancing field of Quantum Biology is revealing that most of the bio mass on planet earth, including our own DNA, function as coherently connected quantum systems. Human beings, birds, and even bacteria are making use of complex quantum effects on a macroscopic scale; something considered to be science fiction as recently as a decade ago. Furthermore Chaos Theory and analysis of Non-Linear Systems have revealed the Universe to be a fractal order-building ecology far from equilibrium. This directly contradicts the Newtonian worldview of a clockwork machine spiraling toward inevitable entropic heat death. Add to these discoveries the abundance of lab tested statistical proofs validating psi phenomenon and we find ourselves confronted with a truly revolutionary corpus of data. As Arthur Eddington once said, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

So the million dollar question remains: What accounts for this stranger than fiction reality we find ourselves embedded in? The answer is revealed once we revive the concept of a Cosmic Ether. After Michelson and Morley were unable to detect Ether drift during their famous interferometer experiments, belief in an absolute all pervasive plenum began to wane. By the early 20th century the Classical Ether was abandoned by most in favor of Einstein’s Relativistic Space-Time Continuum. Einstein labeled the Ether as “superfluous” and in the process convinced the scientific community that the interstellar medium was nothing more than a vacuous immaterial void. Space itself was stripped of its physical significance and reduced to a mathematical abstraction. From this point on all further attempts at elucidating an objective ordered view of the Universe were seen as hopelessly naïve. This emergent paradigm provided fertile ground for a probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics to take hold soon after, further entrenching the idea of a random indifferent Universe governed by atomistic serendipity.

David Bohm, one of the preeminent quantum physicists of the 20th century, was one of the first to object to this trend and revive the concept of an ordered qualitatively distinct space medium. He felt that what we perceive as randomness is an illusion; that what we actually experience as random happenstance is in fact a highly complex form of deterministic chaos. Building off the ideas of Louis DeBroglie, Bohm developed a neo-classical interpretation of quantum physics based on the concept of a subtle all pervasive Quantum Potential Field, otherwise known as the Implicit Order. Within this quantum underworld Information is exchanged faster than the speed of light between subatomic particles by what are called Pilot Waves. As a result coherence and mind-like behavior emerge on a macroscopic scale. Bohm’s Implicit Order provides a theoretical explanation for the “spooky action at a distance” that so troubled Einstein and accounts for the mysterious phenomenon of Spontaneous Self-Organization. Unfortunately these profound ideas are only accepted by a minority of the mainstream physics community despite their rigorous mathematical underpinnings and logical consistency.

If we come to accept the idea that everything was born out of a highly ordered Cosmic Ether, and that we have a dynamic relationship with the fabric of space itself, strange notions like synchronicity begin to make a lot more sense. Everything we once labeled as paranormal suddenly becomes the new normal. In an effort to sidestep the historical baggage associated with the term Ether, many contemporary theorists evoke the concept of the Zero Point Field instead. While growing awareness and acceptance of the Zero Point Field is certainly relevant, unanswered questions remain about both its origins and qualitative dynamics. I contend that similar to the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, Zero Point may be nothing more than a secondary electromagnetic manifestation of the Ether.

If there is no one to one correspondence between Zero Point and Ether, what can we say about the Ether? In innumerable ways the Ether seems to exhibit the properties of a Superconducting Superfluid, or a Bose Einstein Condensate. Superfluids are truly bizarre macroscopic entities that demonstrate a wide array of quantum effects when brought to sufficiently low temperatures. Particles within superconducting superfluids experience little to no friction, which accounts for the Ether’s subtle and undetectable nature. Superfluids cannot be contained and are therefore all pervasive; they flow into and leak out of all known materials with ease. Also perpetual vortex structures can form within superfluids, and these dense vortices would appear to us as elementary point particles in 3-Dimensional Space. Superfluids also possess entangled properties: free flowing electrons known as Cooper Pairs will move in concert with one another despite being separated by unusually large distances. And lastly superfluids are governed by a Universal Wave Function; meaning the superfluid system undulates and reacts as a coherent whole despite being composed of what appear to be discrete entities.

As Sir Oliver Lodge once wrote, “A deep-sea fish has no means of apprehending the existence of water, it is too uniformly immersed in it: and that is our condition in regard to the Ether.” Within this teleological swimming pool we call the Universe synchronicity provides us with sign posts for getting in touch with our higher selves. This is known in certain esoteric traditions as the Great Work. We may not be fully conscious of it, but we are engaged in a constant dialogue with the sub-quantum Ether itself. As components of an imponderable organism that we are forced to refer to as “Space”, we are analogous to highly self-aware cells. Despite their short shelf lives all cellular life serves a purpose, all cells have an important role to play, and all cells receive subtle signals and cues from their host environment. We too must pay attention to those subtle signals and cues if we hope to discover our higher calling. Otherwise we are likely to become nothing more than a cancerous growth.

Understand that I am not implying that our lives, and the future, are completely deterministic. If complex systems analysis teaches us anything, it is that future states of a system are ultimately determined by some novel unpredictable X-factor. As humans we possess the unusual capacity to break old habits and create novelty. Therefore we are the X-factor. That is our collective purpose in the co-creative evolutionary process that lies before us.

3 comments

Interesting. I don’t think anyone knows for sure by the looks of it. Here’s a quote from WikiQuote: “Similar remarks that seem derived from this have in recent years been attributed to Arthur Stanley Eddington, as well as to Haldane, but without citations of an original source.” Take care!

Hi, just fond this site but can’t find an “about me” page. Can you direct me to that, or tell me a bit more about yourself? I love your recent post on the state of conversation on the net – it looks, from my preliminary skimming, that you’re doing a pretty good job of raising the level of discourse. You can answer here or write me at donsalmon7@gmail.com (you might like my essay, “Shaving Science With Ockham’s Razor”, or our (not yet fully public) site, http://www.remember-to-breathe.org